


Backstage

by theseareourvoyages



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: AU, Fluff, High School, High School AU, Highschool AU, Kirk/McCoy - Freeform, Legally Blonde, M/M, Musicals, Sad, Star Trek - Freeform, Theatre, Theatre AU, mccoy/kirk - Freeform, mckirk - Freeform, muscial, musical AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-21
Updated: 2014-02-19
Packaged: 2018-01-09 14:06:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1146874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseareourvoyages/pseuds/theseareourvoyages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Kirk gets caught playing a practical joke on the teachers, his entire life is knocked sideways when Principal Pike forces him to join the stage crew for his high school play's production of Legally Blonde. It seems like a slack job until one of their lead actors, playing Warner, bails just weeks before performance, and Leonard McCoy luckily (for him) discovers that Jim Kirk is seriously one hell of a singer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Act 1, Scene 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shiptoomuch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiptoomuch/gifts).



> Anneliese and I were talking and this entire headcannon scenario kind of played out and so I wrote it. And, if you haven't watch Legally Blonde (the musical), you are missing out, my friend, missing out. Spot the pun in the description and you'll get a virtual cookie.
> 
> Possible trigger warnings: minor character death [George Kirk], excessive drinking of alcohol by minor character.

Jim Kirk had his head in his hand, staring blankly at the wall. He'd finished this ridiculous physics test and turned it in twenty minutes into class. The ticking of the clock and the scratching of the other student's pencils became increasingly annoying as each tedious second passed. God, they'd been doing the same simple problems for the past week and a half and yet everyone in the room looked stumped. The teachers often said that if he had a better attitude, he'd be Riverside's golden boy. 

Seventeen years old and waiting for his sixth period bell to ring, Jim Kirk's gaze turns to the clock. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven...

"The bell's about to ring, go on and turn in your tests," the teacher chirps, and Jim has never found someone's voice so annoying. A collective of panicked groans snips from around the room and Jim swings his backpack on his shoulders just as the bell blows throughout the school.

He walks as if he doesn't have five different colored cans of spray paint in his backpack, crossing easily to the teacher's lounge and slipping in through the sea of students unnoticed. The door clicks closed behind him. He grins and locks the door, tossing his backpack to the floor and pulling the zipper open, grabbing the first can. 

"Oh, man." He laughs, pulling the lid off with a 'pop.'

It's less than a half-hour later that the entire room is covered in blue paint; it's seeped into the couches, the cieling, into the walls... hell, he'd covered every single tea bag, even. Inside the fridge and out...

...serves them right...

...yet it's less than an hour after this that Jim Kirk is in Pike's principal office.

~-~

Jim has never been this pissed off in his life. 

He. He had gotten caught. By Pike, of all people! Any of the other teachers could have seen him and it wouldn't have been a tenth as humiliating as Pike's glare had been.

So he just stands, as useless as possible, leaning against the wall backstage, watching the actors run through the same song of Legally Blonde for the umpteenth time in the last half hour. 

Because detention hadn't been enough, no. Pike had decided that "community service" was needed, Pike had decided that spending time with a bunch of annoying high schoolers was going to help shape him up. Hell, he thinks grimly, blinking slowly. It might be worth not acting up anymore if he doesn't have to deal with these idiots.

As if to prove his point, another senior, like Jim, walks up to him. Jim glances over as the footsteps near, and his interest pipes up ever-so-slightly when the boy happens to be Leonard McCoy.

Of course, the first words out of McCoy's mouth only return him to the pissed state he'd been in just moments before.

"Kid, are you lost?"

"McCoy, I'm older than you." 

Jim barely catches the eyeroll as he turns his gaze away. "Yeah, whatever," Leonard watches Jim cross his arms over his chest. "What are you even doing in the back stage?"

"I'm watching."

Leonard's southern drawl is a bit more pronounced as he snaps, "Yeah, but why, Kirk? Since when do you have the slightest interest in anything other than yoursel-"

"Since I decided to turn the teacher's lounge into an Andorian-colored extravaganza." Jim stops him in the middle, not caring to hear someone else's round of self-absorbed accusations. He'd expected a lot of reactions to that statement: exasperation, anger, even having another attempt at the Jim's-a-narcassist rant. 

But no, no; Leonard McCoy was laughing. Laughing!

"What the hell, McCoy?"

"You- painted-" he gasps out words between laughter, "the- entire- lounge- Andorian blue-?"

The corners of the blonde's mouth twitch up. "Yeah, yeah, I did."

"Oh, dammit-" For half a moment, Leonard is laughing so hard that Jim wonders if his bones are going to shatter, and for half a moment, Jim wonders why Leonard is the only person to respond with something other than 'respect your teachers.'

For a half a moment, Jim wonders if maybe, just maybe, it's time to start trying to make friends again. 

A lopsided grin forms on his lips. "Yanno, Bones, it took me three too many hours and far too many cans of paint to be considered worth this."

~-~

When Jim was twelve, in his seventh grade year, George Kirk died in a crossfire tragedy in the Gamma Quadrant. 

Everyone in their family coped in different ways. Sam stayed for a month, sleeping outside on the roof, staring at the stars all night, before he'd run away. They got a post card every now and then.

Winona had started drinking every night, and two months after George died, she sold their farm and they moved to a tiny, two-bedroom apartment. Every afternoon, she'd be on the couch with a beer in her hand when Jim came home from school, and every night by ten, Jim would be dragging her to bed and tucking her in. 

Jim had started running. Each day, he'd get out of school, and he'd go to the track. At first, he'd only be able to make it once around the football field without running out of breath and having to down his entire canister of water. He'd shrug off the snickers from football players, already too sad and with too much on his mind to really care what they thought. He would catch his breath, and run to lose it all over again. The running became a habit, emptying his system of anger and grief for even a short time. 

He's still not sure if he stopped talking to his friends first or if it had been the other way around. Either way, by the end of seventh grade, he was sitting alone at lunch. 

Winona was fired towards the middle of Jim's freshman year, and instead of trying to get another job, she spent the rest of the money on beer and locked herself in her bedroom. When their water got shut off, Jim started showering after his runs in the locker room, and found that, disturbingly, these bathrooms were much nicer to shower in that his at home. This, too, became a habit. 

When their electricity shut off, Jim started staying at school as long as he could, but the teachers would always kindly ask him to go home at five o'clock, and he'd walk home, more and more upset each day.

When their landlord didn't get their rent for the second month in a row, he threatened to evict them. A panicked, desperate, fourteen-year-old Jim begged for just a little more time, he begged that they'd get the money together - and so the landlord frowned and said that if all three months weren't paid for on time, he was kicking them out. 

Jim got a job on the paper route, and made about twenty dollars a week riding his bike and tossing papers, but even that took hours and hours to do and he still couldn't get the money together. So he got a second job washing dishes for a little pizza restaurant three days a week, being paid under the table, and barely scraped together enough for rent.

He'd been working since then. Sundays, run, paper route. Weekdays, washing dishes. Saturday, doing odd jobs around the neighborhood. He'd been managing to feed the both of them and pay the rent - even if they hadn't had electricity or water in ages. 

And the play was time consuming. 

So, so time consuming. 

Every day, from six o'clock to nine o'clock, he had to stay at school and work props back stage. Which meant that every night, he had to work from ten o'clock to four o'clock in the morning, giving him two hours of sleep every night. He wouldn't mind so much if coffee wasn't so expensive, and if his boss was on the very verge of firing him for having to swap around his schedule so suddenly.

Not to mention that the six hours a day he works is bringing in noticeably less money than the eight hours he had been doing. So much for dinner every night. Or any night. 

The teachers and fellow students assumed that he was pissed because it took away from his evenings. In reality, the punishment took away from his meager income.

He was generally angrier about the lack of food and sleep than the lack of ‘extra time’. 

It only took a week for him to start sleeping through rehearsals, and a week after that for Bones to start whacking him over the head with newspapers to wake him back up. They’d started talking, practically every day now, and Jim snag his attention during school hours at times, too.

But so be it, it was four o’clock, three weeks into his damnation to the play, and he was showering in the locker room after his habitual run. The locker room was empty except for him, per usual, and with the excessive repetition of the same few dozen songs, he’s not surprised to have memorized the lyrics.

And to be singing them.

“We both know why we’re here...” he starts, barely murmuring the opening lines to Serious, voice nearly drowned by the water crashing on his body. “I see it in your eyes…”

It just so happens that Leonard had left his jacket in the locker room during his P. E. class earlier that day, and was walking down the hallway to retrieve it. 

“I guess it calms my fear to know it’s not a surprise.”

Leonard opens the door, the noise drown out by the water rushing in Jim’s ears and his own voice, which reverberated quite nicely through the room.

“I thought one look at you, looking like a dream come true…”

Bones stands stock still for a moment, letting the door click shut behind him. Is that… no, no, it can’t be…

“...would leave me speechless just like you always do.”

In fact, Leo lets him sing, in awe by the sheer beauty of the young man’s voice, until he stops for the spoken word: “Oh, honey, I’m not finished.”

“Kirk?!”

“Fuck-” there’s a stumbling as the water shuts off, and Kirk emerges with a towel draped around his waist, cheeks red. “If you tell a fucking soul, McCoy-”

“You can sing.” Bones muses, relieved. “Ain’t this my lucky day.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They're movements that he knows by heart at this point; hell, Jim could do this in his sleep.   
> Take Leo’s hand, spin him in. Arms around the waist, Leo’s warm body pressed up against his, Jim’s chin hooked over his shoulder, Leo’s intoxicating cologne filling his nostrils as he closes his eyes and squeezes tighter…

(Part Two)  
“Yeah, so? What’s the big deal?” Jim’s defensiveness clicks into play, hands setting on his hips to keep his towel on. 

Leo steels his gaze on the taller boy’s. “The big deal is that our Warner just bailed on us.”

Jim’s silent for a second as the meaning behind Bones’ words clicks, and when the realization dawns over him, he takes a step back. His words try to make up for the confidence his body language betrays he doesn’t have. “What, you want me to understudy? For a big, hot hunk?”

“Warner’s meant to be a big, hot hunk, but I guess you’ll have to do,” Leo snickers, opening one of the lockers to retrieve his jacket.

“Oh, please,” Jim slips back into the shower stall, pulling his clothes on. “One look at me in the shower, and here you are, all over me, trying to character-cast.”

“So that’s a yes?”

“You wish. Even if I did know all of the lines, I wouldn’t bother-”

“Bullshit,” Leo pulls his arms through the jacket. “You know every single line, and I’d be damned if you didn’t have the choreography downpat, too.”  
“I don’t act. I don’t sing.” Jim reammerges, now with jeans around his waist and a t-shirt over his arm. “I’m not doing it.”

“You want to do this the easy way, or the I’ll-go-tell-Pike way?”

Jim glares, pulling the shirt over his head. “What makes you think I’ll be strangled into this at all?”

“Because this play is insanely important to me, and you’re my friend.”

Jim had been sitting, focusing on pulling his socks on his feet, but that word stopped him for a moment, making his gaze snap up. Friend? Nobody’s called him a friend since… since George died.

“We’ll see.”

“Thanks-”

“-that’s not a yes, and I’m not your friend.” Jim snips, shoving his feet into his running shoes, frowning at their condition. He really should get new ones, but money is money.

“...right.” He doesn’t sound convinced. At which statement, neither knows. “Why are you showering in the school’s locker room, anyway?”

“I went on a run. I was sweaty.” Jim’s tone stays clipped.

“Well, yeah, but why not go home and shower? Practice doesn’t start for another,” he pauses to check his watch, unconvinced, “seventy-two minutes.”

Jim bitterly wonders what would happen if he did go home. Winona would probably be awake, drinking beer bought with his hard-earned cash. She’d probably beat the shit out of him with broken bottles and harsh words - that’s what happened last time he came home before she was passed out, anyway. “I don’t see how it’s any of your fucking business.”

Leo raises an eyebrow. “Wasn’t tryin’ to pry, I was just under the impression that these bathrooms are fucking disgusting-”

“Yeah? Well stop.” Jim stops for a moment, glancing around the bathroom, and wonders what it says about him that these unclean school rooms have become an escape. 

~*~

Jim supposes that it can’t be that bad, at first. He’ll act, everyone will still hate him, still ignore him, and he can go back to being the anti-social workaholic like always.  
But the constant going is getting to him. Wake up, go to school, run, shower, homework, play practice, homework, work, homework, sleep, wake up… he keeps telling himself that there are only three weeks left, only three weeks of practice, and then one week for performing in front of people, and then he can go back to his normal schedule and get out of this circle of hell.

But it’s weird, the changes that happen within the first week.

Nyota Uhura starts talking to him. It’s just a ‘hi’ or a ‘hey, Jim, ‘afternoon’, but it’s a lot more than before. Carol Marcus is being civil, considering how disgusted she had been when she first found out her character has to kill Jim’s. Even Spock, the transfer student from Vulcan, was treated him like a member of the cast and not just an everlasting douche.

But their director came up to him after practice Thursday, dragging behind her a very grumpy looking Leonard McCoy.

“Hey, James?”

“Jim,” he corrects automatically, “Yeah, what is it?” He doesn’t look as exhausted as he sounds.

She hesitates, but nevertheless stops in front of him. “Your singing and choreography are really great, but there’s certain aspects of your overall acting that could do with improvement-”

Oh, God. No. No, not another time commitment-

“- so, before practice, Leonard is going to start helping you with line delivery and such, alright?”

Jim frowns. “...Must I? Really?”

The director’s mouth twitches up. “Yes, really. You’re one of the main characters, James.”

“Jim,” he says, frowning. “It’s Jim.”

“Well, it’ll be in effect as of tomorrow, so make sure you stay after school, alright?”

~*~

Leo is sat with a script in one hand and a coffee in the other, standing across from Jim beside a prop table backstage. Jim’s hair is wet from his shower, and he glances enviously at Leo’s coffee. What’d he do for a Starbucks right now...

“Uh, so how are we doing this?” Jim asks, flipping through his script. “It’s not like Warner is with Emmett in a lot of scenes-”

"I can be your Southern Belle for some of the songs you have with Elle. Might not be as pretty as Carol, but I’ll make do.” Leo shrugs nonchalantly as if he plays Elle Woods every day.

Not that Jim would really be that surprised. Theater kids are weird.

Jim barely keeps back a comment about Leo’s looks, running his hand through his hair. “Uh, yeah, alright. So-”

“Serious?” 

For a moment, Jim is worried that Leo’s about to make fun of him and say that he was totally joking but then he realizes that Serious is the title of the song. He mentally kicks himself before answering. “Yeah. I guess.” 

Hey, he’s never claimed to know how to deal with any sort of situation in which he’s about to sing with a really hot theater kid. He hardly knows how to talk to these people. He should say something, really. He should make a joke to break the tension or-

Suddenly, the music starts and he doesn’t have time to think about anything other than the fact that if he messes up this musical, Leonard McCoy will probably - no, actually, there's no debating about the matter, Leonard McCoy will personally kill him very, very slowly. He closes his eyes and focuses on being as douchey as is actually humanly possible. He doesn't feel guilty about drawing the inspiration from Sam. He sings, holds Leo’s hand briefly (Jim Kirk does not do butterflies) before interrupting him and standing, really getting into the choreography this time.

They're movements that he knows by heart at this point; hell, Jim could do this in his sleep.   
Take Leo’s hand, spin him in. Arms around the waist, Leo’s warm body pressed up against his, Jim’s chin hooked over his shoulder, Leo’s intoxicating cologne filling his nostrils as he closes his eyes and squeezes tighter…

Jim practically shoves Leo away and continues with the song when he realizes that he was probably getting a little bit too into it. Leo doesn’t seem to notice, though. He actually looks mildly impressed at Jim’s “acting.”

They continue through the song, getting closer and closer to each other, staring into each other’s eyes and singing. (Leo's taken Elle's part down an octave, because he might be a lot of things, dammit, but a soprano is not one of them.) Even though it’s not a particularly romantic song, Jim can’t help but feel his face heat up as he moves closer and closer to the brunet whom he's almost, for better or worse, befriended.

They’re standing practically chest to chest, Jim’s hands on Leo’s hips while he belts “You and I-” at the top of his lungs. Jim can feel it all coming to a crescendo, the climax of the moment that seems inevitable as they stand in the middle of a held note just waiting for them to lean in and in what would surely be a life changing moment-

“Should break up.” Jim chickens out and croaks out the end of the line before jumping back. A slightly hysterical laugh escapes his mouth and he runs a hand through his hair, just hoping that Leo didn’t feel what he felt. They stand, staring at each other before Jim feels the incessant voice in his head telling him to Just break the silence already.

“That wasn’t the choreography.” He says it and immediately wants to punch himself in the throat. Of all the things he could have said…

Leo’s face falls and Jim is worried that he’ll either start yelling or crying and he does not want either of those things to happen any time soon.

Instead of an emotional outburst, however, Leo just grabs his bag from the edge of the stage and bolts out of the auditorium as fast as his legs can carry him. Jim watches him go and doesn’t have the thought to yell after him until he’s already well out of the auditorium. “Bones, wait!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to @shipstoomuch for helping me finish this chapter... that last scene there never would have made it past ramblings. xoxo. Follow me on Tumblr, nerds: theseareourvoyages

**Author's Note:**

> Those subscribe and kudos and comment buttons look really tempting, don't they? <3


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